It's Groundhog Day!
I'm a couple days late but I agree with these views. All we've seen in crewed spaceflight is repeats of what we did 30 years ago with SkyLab, only at a much higher price for taxpayers and with many more jobs in varied congressional districts. Meanwhile, every singel one of the more abitious projects have remained as "viewgraph " engineering. (OK, OK, now advanced to PowerPoint engineering).
Of course the subsequent shift of $ out of Apollo class manned spaceflight and into transfer payments to social programs has made US education SO much better and eliminated poverty.
-philw